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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 29, 2015
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS
Innovative, eco-friendly technology is now cheap enough for everyday use.
ANNALS OF INNOVATION
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
CONSTRUCTION BY STEPHEN DOYLE
Mark and Sara Borkowski live with
their two young daughters in a
century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-
foot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark
drives a school bus, and Sara works as a
special-ed teacher; the cost of heating
and cooling their house through the year
consumes a large fraction of their com-
bined income. Last summer, however,
persuaded by Green Mountain Power,
the main electric utility in Vermont, the
Borkowskis decided to give their home
an energy makeover. In the course of
several days, coördinated teams of con-
tractors stu ed the house with new in-
sulation, put in a heat pump for the hot
water, and installed two air-source heat
pumps to warm the home. They also
switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s
and put a small solar array on the slate
roof of the garage.
The Borkowskis paid for the improve-
ments, but the utility financed the charges
through their electric bill, which fell the
very first month. Before the makeover,
from October of 2013 to January of 2014,
the Borkowskis used thirty-four hun-
dred and eleven kilowatt-hours of elec-
tricity and three hundred and twenty-five
gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014
to January of 2015, they used twenty-
eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-
hours of electricity and no oil at all. Pres-
ident Obama has announced that by
2025 he wants the United States to re-
duce its total carbon footprint by up to
twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels.The
Borkowskis reduced the footprint of
their house by eighty-eight per cent in
a matter of days, and at no net cost.
I've travelled the world writing about
and organizing against climate change,
but, standing in the Borkowskis' kitchen
and looking at their electric bill, I felt a
fairly rare emotion: hope. The numbers
reveal a sudden new truth---that innova-
tive, energy-saving and energy-producing
technology is now cheap enough for ev-
eryday use.The Borkowskis' house is not
an Aspen earth shelter made of adobe
and old tires, built by a former software
executive who converted to planetary
consciousness at Burning Man. It's an
utterly plain house, with Frozen bed-
spreads and One Direction posters, in-
habited by a working-class family of four,
two rabbits, and a parakeet named Oli-
ver. It sits in a less than picturesque neigh-
borhood, in a town made famous in re-
cent years for its heroin problem. Its
significance lies in its ordinariness. The
federal Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz,
has visited, along with the entire Ver-
mont congressional delegation. If you can
make a house like this a ordably green,
you should be able to do it anywhere.
Most of the technology isn't partic-
ularly exotic---these days, you can buy a
solar panel or an air-source heat pump
at Lowe's. But few people do, because
the up-front costs are high and the op-
tions can be intimidating. If the make-
over was coördinated by someone you
trust, however, and financed through your
electric bill, the change would be much
more palatable. The energy revolution,
instead of happening piecemeal, over de-
cades, could take place fast enough to
actually help an overheating planet. But
all of this would require the utilities---
the interface between people and power---
to play a crucial role, or, at least, to get
out of the way.
An electric utility is an odd beast, nei-
ther public nor exactly private. Util-
ities are often owned by investors, but
they're almost always government-reg-
ulated, and they are charged with de-
livering power reliably and at an a ord-
able price. Utilities are monopolies: since
it would make no sense to have six sets
of power poles and lines, utilities are